Paradox: Pain in the Past, Future, and Present

     When do you feel pain?  Is pain felt in the past or is it imagined as something to come in the future?  Do you feel it here and now as you read this sentence?  Oops, the sentence just became the past, and is now just a memory.  Here it comes...closer...closer, gone back into the past. 

      Remember stubbing your toe, bumping your head, post surgical pain, broken bones, spinal headaches?  Do they hurt now as much as they did when they occurred?  How about before they occurred did they hurt before they happened?

     Of course not.

     Pain occurs in the present, but the present isn't a minute long, it's instantaneous: as soon as its here, its gone into the past.  So, when does pain occur?

     I think we all have a sense of the present as happening as a part of a continuum.  Imagine a piece of string.  Fold it in half; one side of the string before the fold is the future and the other side of the fold is the past.  The present, the state in which we feel something isn't even a part of the string, it's the fold in the string.  Imagine an amazing machine, or entity, perhaps God, folding the string continuously into the future.

     Now imagine this same ever folding string held under running water, which represent   sensory events--remember, the string is ever folding and is as long as your life.

     While it is difficult to view the present in such an empirical way, I don't know any other way to do it.  It seems impossible to make sense of any "real" thing given that there is no perceptible NOW.  However, consider the most important condition in this example, running water dampens the string.  If that wetness is pain, it soaks into past, present and future so that the present is ever folding in a status of pain.  Therefore our feeling now, before and after. Let's say the damper the string, the stronger the pain, thus if water were to run only on the ever folding point of the string, that string would be wettest at the point of the present.

     Then it only makes sense that we might feel pain within our memories, but it's mild because the string is only damp.  The same is true of anticipated pain.  Sometimes the string is damper in the past and future so we feel it more intensely.  Sometimes not.

     I'd write more on this topic, but I haven't got time.  God bless, Colin